Black, White, Colourful, Gray: Visual Effects in the Children’s Book Mimi & Liza

Abstract

The study presents the reader with an intermedial interpretation of the storybook Mimi & Liza written by Katarína Kerekesová – Katarína Moláková – Alexandra Salmela (2013). Thestorybook follows the story of the friendship of two little girls, Mimi, who sees the world proliferating in mad colours, and the blind Liza, who is immersed in inner seeing. The two girls are presented as each other’s opposites through the semiotics of two counterpointing colour schemes. The analysis is based on Mitchell’s conception of media (Mitchell, 1994), that is, it sets out by acknowledging the intermedial state of the culture of children’s books, and then it follows the unfolding of the visual elements up through the investigation of expressive visual effects created by the text’s rhetoric. The visualization happening with the help of language is the condition of the common worldview of the blind and seeing characters as well as the guiding principle and goal of the volume; therefore besides the visual representation characteristic of children’s books, an emphasized role is given to the validation of the ekphrastic perspective in the analyzed work. The ekphrases of the text are presented as intermedial references (Rajewsky, 2010) based on Irina O. Rajewsky’s interpretation of intermediality. A unique feature of the interpretation is that the ekphrases of the volume read as sort of imaginary/imagination ekphrases which create the special, children’s book version of ekphrasis. It is characteristic for this imagination ekphrases that the order of the imaginary image and its linguistic description create an undecidable symbiosis. These images, however, can also be interpreted as inverted ekphrases, since they function not merely as descriptions of imagination ekphrases, but also as the visual world representations of linguistic imagination. Through several examples the study introduces and analyzes the mechanisms of the visualization happening with the help of language as well as the scenery painted with words.